Rushdie's magical mystery tour of India comes to the screen

Cutting Salman Rushdie's 500-plus-page novel to the size of a single long feature results in a sort of slow-mo flash-card version of the book. Rushdie, who did the adaptation, and the film's director, Deepa Mehta, hew closely to the central character, Saleem, who is born to a street singer when midnight tolls to start India's independence day (August 15, 1947). He then gets switched in the hospital with Shiva, the son of a wealthy couple named Sinai.

Saleem's story requires considerable setting-up – as he says in the narration, 'Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence; and my life really began ... more than 30 years before I was born." The events of his life intermingle with India's history from its independence through Indira Ghandhi's cataclysmic rule.

What holds the movie together is the bond between Saleem and Mary, his "ayah" or nanny. Mary, when working as a nurse, had switched him with Shiva in the hospital. It was a romantic, political act: "Let the rich be poor and the poor rich," the man she loved had told her. She eventually embodies, in Seema Biswas' masterly performance, emotional and spiritual truths that transcend politics.

Though she leaves the Sinais' service midway through, Mary re-appears in the movie's final act – and the audience feels the swell of emotion it yearns for in epics that span decades. Elsewhere in the film, bombs and cannon-fire destroy an entire household, but this loss elicits a mere pang. The audience feels as if it's crashing through historical thickets while being hurtled past the milestones of Saleem's life.

Still, what a story! At age 10 Saleem comes into his own as a telepath and realizes that he can summon mentally all of "Midnight's Children," babies born in the first hour of Indian statehood. They're endowed with magic powers. Shiva becomes Saleem's antagonist and a ultra-potent agent of destruction, just like his divine namesake. The conflicts between Saleem and Shiva, and the group destiny of Midnight's Children, reflect the agonizing history of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Despite its truncated and conventionalized form, this epochal tale retains some uncommon pleasures, especially its Dickensian profusion of characters and incidents.

Without the novel's sumptuous, beckoning expanse of prose, the movie requires a taste for the ridiculous to accept that Saleem's power to summon Midnight's Children resides in his enormous nose, comparable to the size and shape of the Deccan plateau in the Indian subcontinent. (It's "better than All-India Radio," Saleem says.) But if you can get on Rushdie's absurdist wavelength, it's fun to be led by Saleem's nose through a pell-mell narrative. It runs from the comic sequence depicting Shiva's biological grandfather being seduced through a perforated bed-sheet to the poignant high point of Saleem marrying a Midnight's Child called Pavarti-the-witch.

As V.S. Pritchett wrote of the novel in 1981, "The human swarm swarms in every man and woman as they make their bid for life and vanish into the passion or hallucination that hangs about them like the smell of India itself." Out of 127 speaking parts, roughly 20 make a vivid impression, and more than a few are performers. They include Vanita, Saleem's biological mother, the street singer who dies at his birth; Vanita's husband Wee Willie Winkie, the street accordionist who raises Shiva; Jamila, Saleem's "sister," who turns into Pakistan's favorite singer; and Picture Singh, a snake charmer, who becomes Saleem's benevolent father figure.

Many characters leap into action with the bounce of a pop-up in a children's book, but these theatrical personalities are stirring and memorable. Days afterward you recall Vanita singing a tender Indian love song to a monstrous Englishman; or Wee Willie Winkie crooning a lilting version of "Goodnight, Ladies" as Vanita dances; or Jamila doing the twist with Saleem on their veranda as he falls in love with her; or Picture Singh relaxing with his cobras.

The film of "Midnight's Children" doesn't reach for the breadth or depth of the book. But as it weaves magical-realist motifs into India's tumultuous history, the movie is an erratically entertaining, seriocomic revue.